School Discipline Party (SDP)

About Us

The School Discipline Party (SDP) was formed in 2014 by a small group of
concerned teachers, ex-teachers and parents residing in New South Wales and Queensland.
We have created a small Executive Committee of the Party drawn largely
from these founding members.

This committee developed the 'provisional' set of Education and Non-Education
Policies that appear in this website.

Our most pressing task now is to obtain the necessary 500 Party members and meet
the other requirements for Federal party registration prior to the next Senate election.

The members of the Executive Committee are obviously united in their
concern about the quality of school discipline in a number of our public schools (and
some private schools). But beyond that we are all individuals with varied views on
education philosophy and, even more so, on non-education issues.

It seems fair to say that roughly half our founding members and Executive
Committee members have centre-right political views and have mostly supported the
Coalition while the other half have centre-left views and have mostly supported
Labor or (in one case) the Greens.

However, all of us are committed to the School Discipline Party working
constructively with whichever government is in power at the time. Our goal is to
promote rather than detract from political stability in Australia and to support
governments of whatever background to do a better job than they might otherwise do.

We also aim to promote high standards of political conduct based on constructive
debate of the issues and avoiding the personal attacks and animosity that can be such
a feature of Australian politics.

We understand that education is not the only issue facing our nation and that any
members of Parliament elected from our Party will need to negotiate and contribute
across a wide range of policy areas.

Most of us felt that we needed to provide a broader framework to guide our
representatives in Parliament and give potential supporters a clearer sense of where
our Party might stand on issues outside education.

Needless to say, the development of the 'provisional' non-education policies presented
here was difficult and time-consuming. It reflected compromises by a range of
individuals who sometimes had very firm counter views. Our goal was to try to take
the best of policies from both sides of the political aisle.

Once Party registration processes are completed we will conduct a review of our
'provisional' education and non-education policies based in part on feedback from
new members and other interested persons and organisations.

We would encourage potential supporters (and potential detractors) not to be too
focused on single elements of our policies. Being a small party, our role in parliament
will necessarily be in considerable part reactive to proposals from the government of the day.
And the stance the SDP takes on a range of non-education issues will also be
influenced by the candidates whom we manage to get elected.

We expect that any such elected representatives will use the policy framework we
have provided as a guide and that they will listen to the views of our membership and
carefully consider them.